“After all, what in the world can have possessed you, Dennis, to back a silly old mare like Barmaid?”

Dennis Brown saw his opportunity.

“I always back horses with the names of things to kiss,” he declared.

Jupp laughed aloud; Sir Chichester chuckled; Miranda looked as haughty as good-humour and a dainty personality enabled her to do.

“Vulgar, don’t you think?” she asked of Joan.  “But racing men are vulgar.  Oh, Joan! have you thought out your book to-day?  Can you now begin to write it?  Will you write it in the window, with the South Downs in front of your eyes?  Oh, it’ll be wonderful!”

“What ho!” cried Mr. Jupp.  “Miranda has joined the highbrows.”

Dennis Brown was too seriously occupied to waste his time upon Miranda’s enthusiasms.

“It’s a pity we can’t get the evening papers,” he said gloomily.  “I should dearly like to see the London forecasts for to-morrow.”

“I brought some evening papers down with me,” said Hillyard, and “Did you?” cried Sir Chichester, and his eyes flashed with interest.  But Harold Jupp was already out of the room.  He came back from the hall with a bundle of newspapers in his hands, pink and white and yellow and green.  He carried them all relentlessly past Sir Chichester to the table in the window.  Sir Chichester to a newspaper, was a needle to a magnet; and while Dennis Brown read out the selections for the morrow’s races of “The Man of Iron” in the Evening Patriot, and “Hitchy Koo” in The Lamppost, Sir Chichester edged nearer and nearer.

Lady Splay invited Hillyard to play croquet with her in the garden; and half-way through the game Hillyard approached the question which troubled him.

“I was wondering whether I should meet Mrs. Croyle here.”

Millicent Splay drove her ball before she answered, and missed her hoop.

“What a bore!” she cried.  “Now I shall have to come back again.  I didn’t know that you had met Stella.”

“I met her only once.  I liked her.”

Millie Splay nodded.

“I am glad.  There’s always a room here for Stella.  I told her so immediately after I met her, and she took me at my word, as I meant her to do.  But she avoids Goodwood week and festivals generally, and she is wise.  For though I would take her anywhere myself, you know what long memories people have for other people’s sins.  There might be humiliations.”

“I understand that,” said Hillyard, and he added, “I gathered from Mrs. Croyle that you had remained a very staunch friend.”

Millie Splay shrugged her shoulders.

“I am a middle-aged woman with a middle-aged woman’s comprehension.  There are heaps of things I loathe more and more each day, meanness, for instance, and an evil tongue.  But, for the other sins, more and more I see the case for compassion.  Stella was hungry of heart, and she let the hunger take her.  She had her blind, wild hour or two; she was a fool; she was—­well, everything the moralists choose to call her.  But she has been paying for her hour ever since, and will go on paying.  Now, if I can only hit your yellow ball from here, I shall have rather a good game on.”